Audit! At The Pentagon

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon on August 28 in Arlington, Virginia.

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Originally published on December 6, 2018 11:53 am

The Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar allocated to federal appropriations.

And it was reported recently that the Defense Department could not account for where all that money went. The Pentagon couldn’t complete a Congress-ordered independent budget audit.

”The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible,” journalist Dave Lindorff wrote.

The audit identified 20 “material weaknesses” or deficiencies in the department’s internal controls. Most of them did not point to particular instances of fraud or mismanagement. Rather, they found that in many cases the department is simply not tracking payments filtering in and out of its myriad agencies, leading auditors to question whether its financial statements are accurate.